Seven Faces of Multiple Personality in Literature

1. Labeled: A character is labeled as having “multiple personality” (aka dual personality, split personality, or dissociative identity). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a synonym was double consciousness. If readers don’t see an explicit label of multiple personality, they usually don’t think of it.

Other synonyms include alter ego, the double, doppelgänger, demon or spirit possession, eidolon, and daemon, but these are often thought of as literary or religious issues.

2. Implied: Although the multiple personality is not labeled as such, many readers see it as implied when a character has more then one name, correlated with different behavior; for example, Gollum/Sméagol and Jekyll/Hyde. But since the multiple personality is not labeled as such, it is not known whether the author thought of it as multiple personality, per se.

3. Unacknowledged: A character has symptoms of multiple personality (e.g., memory gaps or nonpsychotic voices), and it is integral to the plot and character development, but since it is not labeled as multiple personality, readers don’t think of it as multiple personality, and the author may not have thought of it in those terms, either.

4. Gratuitous: Multiple personality symptoms are unacknowledged and usually unnoticed, but they are not necessary to plot and character development, and are present only because the author saw them as ordinary psychology, based on the author’s own psychology.

5. Pseudonyms: When authors have an alternate personality who prefers another genre or simply wants to publish under its own name, it may publish under a pseudonym. In some cases, the author’s supposedly regular name is already a pseudonymous alternate personality.

6. Pseudo-nicknames: The narrator refers to a character by two different names (representing two different personalities), but, unlike the obviously different names in the implied type (see above), the second name is easily mistaken for just a nickname or alternate form of address.

7. Writing Process: The author may have narrators, characters, voices, muses, and other behind-the-scenes alternate personalities involved in the writing process. (An alternate personality is an imaginary psychological entity that has a sense of its own identity, its own memory, and its own opinions; i.e., it seems to have a mind of its own.)